improving technical knowledge (jr. associate level)
A bit of background: I'm currently at a junior associate level at the PE fund of mid-market investment bank. My current role is very operationally heavy, and I essentially act as a financial director at one of our portfolio companies. This is not a very exciting position, as while the level responsibility is good, it essentially boils down to taking care of a lot of admin-type work to make sure the company's project is progressing, our lenders are happy, and there is money in the bank account.
Previously I was involved in much more transaction-oriented work (closer to classic PE), however due to various reasons, this has been put on hold, the team has been significantly cut, and we are not really looking at any new deals for the foreseeable future. This also means there is very limited development potential for me currently, and I'm not really learning much.
My plan is to stick around until the end of the year, and move to a proper PE firm. My concern is that my technical knowledge would have some gaps compared to other candidates, because of my heavy operational focus this year - my question is, what would you recommend to do in the meantime to brush up my technical knowledge? What are the main technical areas I should focus on? Besides general transaction management skills, what skills should I focus on at a jr. associate level? (prior to this, I used to be in banking, but as it was the middle of the crisis, it was a lot of pitches, and few deals)
I have access to a number of our models (also from the banking side), so I have been doing some self-study with models for sectors I'm not too familiar with. Any recommendations would be highly appreciated. Cheers.
tldr: jr. associate is looking for suggestions to improve his technical knowledge
upwardsloping, This won't
upwardsloping,
This won't answer your question directly, but I don't think you should be focused on improving your technical knowledge. As a junior associate, most of the skills that you'd be looking to build are strategic skills. Things like being able to assess a company's prospects, understand businesses, and manage aspects of the due diligence process. If you were originally hired into a transaction role and spent a little bit of time doing deals, you should already have the requisite technical knowledge to lateral to another PE fund. I think you'd be far better off positioning yourself as an "operationally experienced" PE associate.
CompBanker
I think a lot of PE
I think a lot of PE associates would be jealous of your position. You have actual power in ensuring the success/failure of one of the funds investments. Do a great job and, like CompBanker said, you will be "operationally experienced."
Think of it this way, if you can model, you can model, but not everyone can manage and coordinate between groups of people under project deadlines and financial constraints. Try to figure out ways where you can fix/improve things with the portfolio company.
Do some reading on Kaizen, "continuous improvement". It isn't only about maximizing production efficiency, it can be applied to any situation or process. You never know, the ideas/changes you come up with could be the difference between earning "regular" cash flows and your MD thinking of the portfolio company as some kind of money machine.
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